| This ethnographic account of the lived experience of researchers doing HIV/AIDS related research in the social sciences builds from extensive participant-observation and in-depth interviews with eleven researchers, from grassroots "rookies" to renowned academics, to forge an "outline of a theory of practice" for social-scientific research on HIV/AIDS. When the scientific gaze is reversed from the HIV infected body to the AIDS researchers themselves, a remarkably different, indeed "deviant" memorial practice emerges of how HIV/AIDS social science research is produced, a practice in which "queer" movements of desire figure prominently.;This study documents the ways in which the quotidian actualities of the "doing" of AIDS social-scientific research are systematically expunged from research accounts, not only as they are under external pressure to conform to traditional conventions for the production of "good social science", but also under the immense pressure of "catastrophic" conditions of AIDS that require AIDS researchers to be explicit about the "queerness" and activism of their research practices. Exhuming and documenting this rich and vital body of knowledge, experience, and purpose that is consistently "forgotten" in social-scientific research on HIV/AIDS represents, then, a practice of memory which is at the same time a memorial practice, one which seeks to re-collect lost personalities, motivations, experiences and desires, and to show how these ghostly presences nonetheless inhabit even the best-sanitized research.;Researching the lived experience of social science AIDS researchers in this way is a species of "ghost-writing" that offers an unsettling portrait of the progress of a cultural contagion which inescapably infects the epistemic "corpus" of the subject of AIDS. This work seeks to reveal what lies buried beneath the flesh of AIDS knowledge, thereby to illuminate the very real, very vital contributions of embodied subjects who live out the contradictory perils and pleasures of fidelity and betrayal, safety and "slip-up", community and complicity, and life and death. |
